It has about 25 pages of text, is cut-to-the-chase stuff and you should read it. If the plan works out as described, we should be able to bring back wild BC salmon that DFO has, shamelessly, managed into extinction for 50 years.

I put some thoughts together based on parts of the report and sent it in to them. I agree with much of it, and think, that of the two criticisms I have read so far that the issue of hatcheries and genetics that the ENGOs are worried about, will be satisfactorily taken care of. The issue of not asking enough questions from the BC interior is fair, and the plan contains action to reach out to all areas of the province.

Here is what I sent in to the WSAC:

Hi
Doug/Martin/Allison

I
am reading the new report and am in agreement with most of it. I have a few comments/questions
for WSAC:

P6: “It must also be
noted that investment in scientific study and data quality and quantity with
respect to wild salmon management
has been significantly reduced over the past several years.”

Doesn’t this
mean that the Integrated Fishing Management Plans for north and south BC
have no factual basis?

I caught that
you got the PSF to do a stock assessment – can you give me a link to it?
Note that my overall figure from assessing DFO reports is, in an average
year, 73 Million in-ocean, pre-fisheries; 38M escapement.

P8: Reference 10 -
Estimate of salt sport revenue: $1B. We all use this, but I looked at
fresh/salt angling and came up with $2.52B, and if Strait of Georgia coho are
brought back, an additional $200M – Pacific Salmon Foundation mid-point figure.
My figure is public, published by the PSF.

P12: Habitat
Protection – Re laws and enforcement, don’t expect much from DFO as it has
chronically underfunded this. Read Randy Nelson’s, Poachers, Polluters and Politics. He was a director of Conservation
& Protection.

P12: Habitat
Restoration – Yes to this. But I don’t agree to employment ops until leveraged
restoration has been done. Yes, to in-stream options like spawning channels; Big
Q and Taylor are terrific examples of this work, and can serve as models. The
San Juan – above the Harris confluence – that blew five years ago, is an
example of a river looking for a good, large spawning channel project. Any
river with old channels or a flat, bottom section has this potential – high water
table, willow to alder coverage.

P13: Salmon
Enhancement – No to Alaska’s ‘ocean ranching’ and no to other States’ ‘springer’
approach, both of which degrade wild genetics. But, epigenetics should be used
here to make ‘wild’ hatchery fry. And sterilized, fin clipped fry make for
non-reproducing stock, and terminal mop-up fisheries. Yes to sterilized,
clipped netpen chinook for Southern Resident Killer Whales.

P 14: Data, Research
and Science – After I crunch the new BC Stats/AG report on the fishing sectors,
I will turn my attention to climate change research and make suggestions to deal
with the issues. I will have many novel approaches.

P15: Governance – Yes to
the first sentence.

P16: Fishing – Yes to
terminating the herring roe fishery.

P16: Fish Farms – BC is
behind the rest of the world in putting fish farms on land. The new US plants,
Atlantic Sapphire, Whole Oceans, Nordic Aquafarms and Aquabanq, aiming at
218,000mt may well put the in-ocean BC industry out of business. Globally, Pure
Salmon is aiming at 260,000mt. BC is less than 100,000mt. Here is a post of on-land
good news, almost 100 articles in the last 3 months: http://fishfarmnews.blogspot.com/2018/11/links-to-on-land-closed-containment.html.
When you need info, ask me for it.

Note
that fish farm sewage is a big cost to BC: $10.4B, my estimate makes the revenue
of $777M only 7.5% of the cost.

P16: Climate Change – As
above, I am working on solutions to the problem.

P19: Strategy 1.1: Immediately:
Provide support to 'provincial organizations' that are
working to protect habitats.

I
assume you will use the Pacific Salmon Foundation. As they leverage money 4 to
7 times, that means if BC puts in $15M each year for ten years, the cumulative
effect is $600- to $1,050-million.

Without
expecting DFO to do much, the simplest thing is to ask for the same amount of
funding to the PSF, a drop in their $2.4B budget bucket, and they can claim to
be helping out. That would make a cumulative total of $1,200- to $2,100-million
in ten years.

P20: Strategy 1.3: Monitoring
and enforcement. Make sure that BC does it and you don’t give any
responsibility to DFO as they have done poorly and are not to be trusted. See
P12 above.

P21: Strategy 1.4: Yes
to both immediate tasks, and: do some restoration projects ASAP, prepare news
releases and get them in the press, so the public sees the result of the WSAC process
immediately.

P21: Mid-term: As DFO
has been managing wild salmon into extinction for 50 years, I would not count
on the Feds doing much. I would first get the cash for habitat restoration, and
then talk about joint actions.

P22: Strategy 1.5: I
would put out a news release on the selective nature of WSAC salmon enhancement
plans which would ameliorate ENGO concerns.

P25: Yes to BC
branding.

P25: Strategy 2.6.: Yes
to better stats from BC Stats, but a separate report would be better for the ‘fishing
sectors’. As noted, my estimate of salt/fresh sport revenue far exceeds what we
currently use. Remember that DFO uses its stats to add more fish farms in BC. It’s
revenue is only 7.4% of the sewage cost, but DFO doesn’t calculate sewage cost.

P25: Goal 3:
Immediately: Yes to an on going structure within government for the Made in BC Wild
Salmon Plan. The unit gets things done, and lobbies on behalf of salmon.

1. Lack of 'evidence and science' based DFO decision making. I cite a dozen examples on this site in the past year. A current one is that after the Feb 5, 2019 decision by Strickland that DFO must test for PRV, you coalesced your 'rapid science response' people to say PRV is not a problem.

2. The recommendations you cite from the Popham finfish committee, are tainted. The committee had fish farm representatives on it. The committee that has come after it is the Wild Salmon Secretariat, for bringing back wild salmon. It has no fish farm representatives twisting the recommendations.

Here are the tainted recommendations that you cite:

“A brief overview and economic analysis of existing and emerging technologies, including their state of commercialization; (Fish farms are dead set against on-land and will argue all day long that it doesn't make money, ignoring the huge value in protecting the ocean/salmon from using it as a free open sewer);

“An analysis of the environmental impacts of these technologies; (Fish farms say there is no land for on-land, and use far more electricity than in ocean, overlooking the $10.4B in sewage damage they have caused in BC, PRV and so on, lice explosion in Clayoquot Sound in 2018, algal bloom for Grieg, etc).

“An analysis of how sensor technologies and data could further address potential environmental impacts; (Sensors largely monitor the fish and do not assess environmental impacts).

“An analysis of the social implications, including job creation and impacts on coastal/rural communities; (Fish farm stats are false. They claim 7,000 multiplier jobs, when the BC govt's own figure is 1800, making the fish farm stat 390% too high. I will shortly crunch the new BC Stats report, released in 2019).

“A
financial assessment of commercially available technologies, including
an analysis of the main factors influencing their financial performance; (I have dozens of studies on how on-land makes money. See the 270 on land post below. It is led out by dozens of studies).

“An analysis of trade-offs between environmental, economic and social impacts of the technologies reviewed; and, (The reality is that using the ocean as a free, open sewer far exceeds the revenue from the in-ocean sector, $777M is only 7.5% of the sewage damage: $10.4B. We can completely avoid the sewage cost and have increased revenue on land).

“Recommendations to address potential obstacles to adoption of each of the technologies reviewed.” (Fish farms will argue all day long that on-land can't be done, even while the USA takes away almost 85% of its market by the big four on-land systems coming on line: Atlantic Sapphire, Whole Oceans, Nordic Aquafarms and Aquabanc, a total of 218,000mt).

Jonathan how about you see the light and choose on-land fish farms? You might consider the hundreds of thousands of votes you'll get in the 2019 election, and announce on-land right now. BC residents, like all citizens who must live with in-ocean fish farms around the world, hate in-ocean fish farms.

At 586 pages, the southern plan demonstrates a high
level of technical wizardry and high cost. Ditto for the northern plan.

And there are many interesting sections of this
report. I would go after what you are interested in the table of contents,
click on it and the document will take you to read it. It’s all here, for
example, Cowichan chinook, Fraser chinook, Fraser pink (this is an odd year),
WCVI chinook, SEP program (Salmon Enhancement Program) along with a link to the
plan for 2019 releases ( I sent out a link to the actual output in 2018 some
time ago) and so on.

Much fascinating reading in this document – for several
days; however, for all the mastery of the document, the fifteen pages of DFO phone
numbers and links, the reality is that BC wild salmon, after 50 years, have
been managed into extinction by DFO, along with the SRKWs that have been
managed down to 74 + 1 whales.

I have given you my answer to solving the SRKW problem,
which is multiple netpens of 2,000,000 each, fin clipped, sterilized chinook
around southern BC, every year for the next ten, along with habitat restoration
cash, epigenetic enhancement, seal cull and so on. However, the thrust of both of these
documents is the same as it always is: ratcheting down fishing, but not
looking at the overall picture and coming up with a workable plan to save wild
salmon.

Do pour over the IFMP document. It has much of the
information you will need on stocks when you are looking for facts when
thinking about salmon issues all year long.

One last thing, I would say that you should support
the Wild Salmon Secretariat (WSS) in their work to bring back salmon. BC has
the local knowledge, the BC govt cost is manageable, and BC has responsibility for
freshwater habitat restoration, which I would do through the Pacific Salmon
Foundation.

Here are a bunch of problems and I think that
focusing the WSS on achievable outcomes could solve a lot of the problems that
have gone unanswered by DFO over the years: http://fishfarmnews.blogspot.com/2018/10/lets-take-global-look-at-srkw-problem.html.
In this one I broach the subject that DFO says it bases decisions on ‘evidence
and science’, pointing out several cases where it did just the opposite; one glaring
one is when DFO and the CFIA went looking for a lab that would produce ‘no
disease’ in BC fish farms.

Wednesday, 20 February 2019

We are now at a point that I thought was only a matter of time to get to: once fish farms have killed off all the fish in the ocean, what do we do then? The ramifications are very broad - and we are now there. This is bad.

What they found was that: '19 of 20 global forage fish stocks are either collapsing, poorly managed or both.'

The Sea Around Us singled out Norway for having destroyed the Jack Mackerel off Chile. Now, the industry is destroying the anchovetta off Peru.

And remember that those 19 fed the entire ocean food web, as well as Asia where they don't do reduction fisheries (or didn't, as they are now mopping up the anchovetta off Peru) for non-human consumption. Mostly humans eat them, the only real use for killing fish needed by the ocean food networks.

But fish farms have depleted those 19 stocks in less than 50 years to provide farmed salmon for first world mouths. That is reprehensible, and the 20th stock, Antarctica krill, isn't even a fish, and they are being ripped from the sea right now.

So, we are now at the penultimate moment in the non-sustainability of the fish farm industry's fish feed industry. At this point, past the tipping point, the California conference on seafood had some working sessions of industry people.

Here is what industry management has to say about killing off all the fish:

War: Countries facing food security issues as a result of the
disappearance of forage fish sources would seek to protect the resources
they have. Other countries presumably could battle for access to other
nation’s resources. [Yes, global warfare is one possible outcome. Do remember we are talking about farmed fish feed that fish farms have killed off all those global stocks - that should have been for people, if they were caught at all.]

Ecosystem imbalance or collapse: Without feeder fish in the marine ecosystem, a massive collapse of the environment could result, affecting all fish. [Yes, the fish farms are saying they have caused a 'massive collapse'. This collapse will have been caused by the Norwegian-style fish farm industry, having killed off all those stocks in less than 50 years.]

Genetics: The loss of forage fish could lead to a massive investment in genetics to solve the problem.[Sure, get back to me when you have invested trillions to 'solve genetics' rather than raising vegetarians.]

Farming forage fish: Can we figure out a way to farm forage fish, many of the groups asked. [So after you killed them all off to feed farmed fish, you want to farm all the forage fish you killed off? I don't think so.]

Prices: Increase in seafood prices for both farmed and wild fish. [Duhh, and what about all those billions of third world humans who don't have food anymore and can't afford farmed fish?]

Regulations: New regulations affecting capture fisheries and aquaculture could evolve. [After fish farms killed off all the fish. Disgraceful.]

Should we eat fish at all: There could be a change in the perspective of all fish as a food source. [Really, I'd say that on-land fish farming of vegetarians and Alaska ocean-ranching of wild salmon may be the outcome, even though Alaska has chosen to push out billions of pink and sockeye fry and accept the pollution to wild salmon genetics. Or do we not want any kind of salmon anymore?]

This is where we are today: less 50 years after the Norwegians had their 'Blue Revolution' the whole experiment ends up on the rubbish tip as the English say.

It didn't have to come to this. Herbivores, like tilapia, have always been the answer to this rapacious industry. And there are chickens, cows, sheep... .

They left Norway looking for lower legal standards. And ended up in Chile, Scotland, England, Shetlands, Ireland, west coast Canana, east coast Canada, WA, USA where they are being closed. Disgraceful. Disgraceful.

About Me

I won the national RODERICK HAIG- BROWN AWARD, 2016, for environmental writing, largely for this blog (www.fishfarmnews.blogspot.com) that has become a global portal for the environmental damage made by Norwegian-style fish farms.
I won the Art Downs Award for 2012 for sustained and outstanding writing on environmental issues, in my case, fish farms.
The award was based on 10 columns on fish farm issues in the Times Colonist newspaper, three public submissions to the Cohen Commission on Fraser sockeye and this blog.
If you want to book me to speak, for a lecture, talk, or panel on fish farm environmental damage, contact me on this blog by leaving a message on a post.